Frederick Douglass: “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro” – Zinn Education Project:
Frederick Douglass: “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro”
Film clip. Frederick Douglass “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro” (1851) is read by Danny Glover. From Voices of a People’s History of the United States.
Frederick Douglass
“The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro,” a speech given by Frederick Douglass in Rochester, NY on July 5, 1852, is read by Danny Glover.
In this famous speech, Douglass says:
“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sound of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanks-givings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes
In heading his state in the direction of universally available vouchers rationalized by public school failure, Jindal is not, of course, holding any of the private school beneficiaries accountable for results, or for common curricula, or, it appears, for much of anything. A big chunk of the money already out there is being snapped up byconservative evangelical schools with exotic and hardly public-minded curricular offerings, with the theory being that any public oversight would interfere with the accountability provided by "the market." So if you want your kid to attend, at
